And Then Nothing Happened

Checking my voicemails this morning, I heard the following message from a frustrated and bewildered caller, spoken not to me, but to a family member in the background:

“Well, I heard her say who she was, and that she looked forward to helping me – and then nothing happened.”

Like many of you, I long ago deleted what I thought were culturally outdated instructions in my voicemail:

“At the sound of the beep, please leave your name and number and I will gladly return your call.”

Corporate voicemails still say that, and now I know why. Very few personal voicemails do, and if they do, others mock them for stating the obvious, much like we mock the instructions to not drink the battery acid, or a warning that the Superman pajamas do not actually enable the child to fly. As my Gen Y co-worker and I discussed this morning, it is absolutely incomprehensible to us that someone would hear the “beep” and not understand what to do next.

Yet this is not the first such voicemail I have received. The previous one was mercifully anonymous as the caller chatted to a family member about the meetings they were attending and the food being served, while expressing frustration that I had not answered my phone.

As someone whose title, education and identity are all emblazoned with the word “communications,” it clearly behooves me to update, or retro-date my voice message for maximum effectiveness. The rest of you will just have to sit through the redundancy.

But as someone who truly cares about helping people, I am nearly as frustrated as they are when this happens – I wish I could reach through the phone line and reassure them that I am listening, that I do care about solving their problem. In fact, nine times out of ten, I could easily have answered their question and alleviated their concern within minutes, had they just understood how the system works to get their message through.

Suddenly I get this mental image of God checking His voicemails and hearing the following, spoken not to Him but about Him to a friend:

“I’ve prayed and prayed about this but God doesn’t answer. I’m still (broke/sick/single/miserable) so I guess it must be God’s will for me to stay that way. I guess God doesn’t care about my problem.”

I can almost begin to comprehend what must be His frustration. I can imagine a teardrop fall on a nail-pierced hand.